Reshaping the State: Administrative Reform and New Public Management in France

This essay examines the administrative reform process in France since the late 1980s. The key reforms undertaken during this period have sought to delegate greater managerial autonomy to the ministerial field-service level. We undertook semistructured interviews with officials in the field services of three French ministries (Education, Agriculture, and Infrastructure) in the Champagne-Ardennes region, as well as with members of the wider policy communities. The capacity of the field services to adopt a proactive approach to management reform depended on five key variables: internal organizational dynamics; the attitude of the central services to mesolevel autonomy; the degree of institutional receptivity to change; the type of service delivery, and the extent of penetration in local networks. The Infrastructure Ministry was more receptive to management change than either Education or (especially) Agriculture, a receptivity that reflects the institutional diversity of the French administrative system, and that supports new institutionalist arguments. The essay rejects straightforward convergence to the New Policy Management norm. Changes in public management norms require either endogenous discursive shifts or else need to be interpreted in terms of domestic registers that are acceptable or understandable to those charged with implementing reform.     

THE FRENCH STATE AND ITS TERRITORIAL CHALLENGES

This article focuses upon the territorial challenges to the French state. There is a genuine policy puzzle in terms of how to join up separate agencies of the state that is far from unique to France. Introducing new evidence based on interviews with high ranking officials, politicians and representatives of territorial policy communities in 2010, the main body of the article focuses upon the two main territorial reforms of the Sarkozy presidency, the reform of the territorial state, and the local government reform. These cases reveal an original attempt to craft a political discourse based on public sector productivity and state puissance. The article explores the tension between synoptic models of reform, focused on the expectation of rapid and quantifiable macro‐level change that suits the short‐term returns of the political cycle; and institutionalized processes of meso‐level implementation, with different timescales, logics of appropriateness and configurations of actors.     

Factionalism, the French socialist party and the fifth Republic: An explanation of intra-party divisions

Abstract. This article traces the evolution of factions (the term preferred to that of 'fraction') within the French Socialist party (PS) from the early twentieth century until 1981, with special reference to the post-1971 PS as a party of opposition. It concentrates on the causes and structures of factions, as well as their location in relation to the wider political system and the degree of political space they were able to occupy within the party. It argues that factions were divided by personal rivalries (accentuated by the presidentialised Fifth Republic), ideological and party policy differences, party strategy, power rivalries within the organisation and different historical origins. Factions corresponded more or less to a series of ideal-types. These were the organisation faction, whose power stemmed from its position within the party organisation; the parallel faction, whose separate factional structures paralled official party ones, and the external faction, which attempted to transform external popularity into internal party strength. Four factions prevailed: Mitterrand, Mauroy, CERES and Rocard. Those headed by presidentiables enjoyed the most success, whereas the others gradually declined. The presidentialism of the French regime set the PS apart from its European counterparts.     

Pioneering New Politics or Rearranging the Deckchairs? The 2007 National Assembly for Wales Election and Results

This article analyses the campaign, results and outcome of the 2007 elections to the National Assembly for Wales. It discusses the constitutional and legislative framework of devolution in Wales, the election campaign and opinion polls. There is extensive analysis of the election results, the performance of each of the main and some of the smaller parties. Shifts in representation of women and ethnic minority AMs and departures and new arrivals are covered. There is discussion of changes in electoral turnout and the proportionality of the outcome, which is low and has declined since 2003. The final substantive section deals with the complexities of the post-election coalition negotiations, while events in Wales are placed in the context of international experiences around the formation of coalition governments     

White-Collar Crime in Socialism: Myth or Reality?

Previous research on the determinants of police expenditures has not risen to the level of empirical understanding in large part because it has failed to explain substantively important variation among local jurisdictions. This suggests a need to reevaluate research strategies and to examine closely those cases which cannot be predicted using traditional, social, economic, and environmental approaches. Incorporating deviant case analysis, the authors outline an alternative approach to determine whether policy maker variables should be added to more broadly based models.